Photo credit: Fred Seddon
Directing
I make work that splits open cruxes of difficult-to-reach emotion and strives to arrive at a place of hope. My work centres mis/communication and I'm often searching for ways to stage the interior world. I like making work about climate, capitalism, and anything that's a bit weird. Paying attention is at the heart of my practice.
I direct monthly for Oxford's new writing night, Prototype, including works by Mike Bartlett, Tristan Jackson Payte, and Ellen Robertson.
how to run away with the sea - Maya Little
Photo credit: Fred Seddon
Work-in-progress.
how to run away with the sea is a love story between a human and the sea. It uses the framework of a romance to embed critical thinking about the climate crisis in audiences’ local environments. Through this romance, we explore what projection, curiosity, intimacy, breaking of trust and reconnection look like in the relationship between human and the natural world. Designed as a site-specific audio play for beaches, the piece uses poetry and soundscaping to expand the sea’s voice and gesture towards ways of being beyond the human.
how to run away with the sea has received development support from the Classroom Bursary, IOU's STTA programme (with actors Lara Deering (pictured) and Georgie Dettmer), and Studio Space Art Dundee. If you're interested in finding out more, get in touch.
The Untold Story of Alice Breakspear
Photo credit: Simon Vail
For Offbeat Festival.
1892, St. Giles Fair: Alice Breakspear fatally falls from the carousel, but was it really an accident? And does anyone really care? It was just ‘some woman' in an act of tomfoolery after all…
2024: Nina returns to Oxford to clear out her family home following the death of her mother. Amidst her own troll collections, boxes of unopened happy meal toys and her mother's stash of takeaway menus, Nina uncovers more to Alice's story than she could ever have imagined. But just why has her mother kept a box of cuttings about ‘Alice'? Intrigued, Nina plans to investigate. Tess, Nina's younger sister, just wants the house cleared ASAP.
Is Alice's story a convenient escape for Nina from the realities of the present, as sibling tensions simmer and old wounds surface, or does unravelling the past offer a key to moving forwards in the present for both sisters?
Collaboratively written by Lucy Brenchley, Emily Cracknell, James McDougall, Nick Myles, Liz Pagett, and Ainhoa Santos Goicoechea, participants in Mike Bartlett's How to Write a Play course.
Unmade - Georgina Dettmer
Image credit: Matt Coleclough
Directed for Paper Moon, work-in-progress commissioned by Offbeat Festival.
Charting a love story across the years, this unmade bedroom is home to immaterial hauntings through time. Capturing a mother and her daughter, their love stories, their goodbyes, and their tender quiet moments emanate from this immersive set which you will find yourself in. Move inside the bedroom, unmade.
Home Fires - Maya Little
"They used to say I had your voice on the phone. But that can't be true. Not really. They just didn't listen closely enough."
Sometimes you know you should talk to someone, but it's so much easier in your head. In the wake of her father's death, Marie imagines speaking to her estranged mother, playing out the conversation in her head. Amidst false starts and dead ends, she pleads for resolution.
A piece of new writing about families, inheritance, and broken connections.
REVIEWS:
'Writer and director Maya Little has created something at once intimate and engaging, with beautifully crafted language and a powerful use of silence.' - Cherwell
'Blazing The Standard For Student Theatre' - Oxford Blue
Stranger, Baby – Emily Berry, adapted by Maya Little
Image credit: Kate Haselden
"Strange love for the living, strange love for the dead."
A riveting play on the themes of mothers and daughters, love and loss, and the sense of a splitting self. Based on the award-winning collection of poems by Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby portrays a daughter's grief over losing her mother and the accompanying crumbling sense of selfhood in the isolation of her bereavement. The drama and intensity of our internal lives and often unspoken struggles is brought to life, through this authentic and compelling original adaptation.
REVIEWS:
‘remarkable… affecting… striking' - 4* Cherwell
‘A dramatization of poems may initially seem like an excessively cerebral project, but Stranger, Baby is the opposite of that: it is a plunge into real, unadulterated emotion in its frank and conflicting form.' – Oxford Opening Night